Middlesex Probate & Family Court website goes offline

Regular visitors to the Middlesex Probate & Family Court’s website were shocked to see the following announcement this week: Middlesex County Probate and Family Court website is no longer available due to lack of funds. If you wish to donate to continue this site or you wish to purchase this site, you can email us by clicking on the following link.

It turns out this is common for Probate & Family courts. Hampshire, Bristol and Plymouth counties all have similar sites, and Worcester Register of Probate Stephen Abraham tells Lawyers Weekly he’s working on launching a similar website for his office.

The Middlesex site is registered to Diane Bender, who used to work at the Plymouth Probate & Family Court. While there, she set up a site for the registry and ended up designing similar sites for courts in several other counties.

Each register pays for the site out of his own budget. When Middlesex Register of Probate John R. Buonomo resigned in the midst of an alleged theft scandal, he had already paid Bender through December. But she’s been unable to reach Buonomo’s recently sworn-in successor, Tara DeCristofaro, so she took the site down.

Bender says that if anyone – be it DeCristofaro, a bar association or individual attorneys – wants the site restored, she can have it back online within five minutes, as long as her $125 a month bill is paid.

Until it went down, the Middlesex site generated 200 to 300 hits a day, as well as multiple e-mails, which Bender forwarded to the appropriate contact at the registry.

UPDATE 1/19/09:

DeCristofaro just called Lawyers Weekly. She said she’s aware that the site is down, but that its status has not been “a priority on my list” for two reasons: A committee is currently revamping many of the court’s forms, and the Probate & Family Court component of the MassCourts internal computer network is going live next week.

Some 30 new forms are expected to be released, which DeCristofaro said will be posted on the mass.gov site. “Those are the more accurate forms to use,” she said. “I may decide to go back and use [mcpfc.com] at some point.”

Although she was just sworn in (Jan. 7), DeCristofaro had been notified last month that the plug was about to be pulled on mcpfc. Asked if she had considered requesting that the old site point to the mass.gov site, she said she hadn’t, “but that’s a good idea.”

2 comments

I find it extremely expensive that a county office’s site is being hosted for $125/month. Surely, the Middlesex Probate Court can find a more affordable web host in light of the Commonwealth’s economic troubles.

Just to clear a misunderstanding. The Middlesex Probate and Family Court website was paid for by the Register of Probate, NOT by the County Office. It is paid for by the Register, personally. This was never paid for by the Commonwealth.